


This Most Beautiful System

by rosepetalfall



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-19
Updated: 2013-08-19
Packaged: 2017-12-24 00:47:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,972
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/933135
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosepetalfall/pseuds/rosepetalfall
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Like Watson and Crick, Newton Geiszler and Hedda Gottlieb are two scientific names almost invariably thought of together. </p><p>-</p><p>Hedda Gottlieb and Newton Geiszler grow up, save the world, conquer academia, defy the odds, do some ill-advised things, do some brilliant things, and learn about love. Not necessarily in that order.</p>
            </blockquote>





	This Most Beautiful System

**Author's Note:**

  * For [antistar_e (kaikamahine)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaikamahine/gifts).



> I played around with canon throughout this fic, especially with regards to the information coming from the graphic novel and the novelization, as I haven't actually read either! So I know that a lot of what's in here isn't strictly canonical, but I tried to blend what I got from the Pacific Rim wiki with my personal writing. 
> 
> Title comes from Isaac Newton's _Principia Mathematica_ , in translation.

-

_[Excerpted from “How Science Saved the World”, in the January 12, 2035 special edition of the New York Times Magazine]_

_Like Watson and Crick, Newton Geiszler and Hedda Gottlieb are two scientific names almost invariably thought of together. Despite their differing fields of expertise and the multiple individual projects both have tackled in the decade since the Battle of the Breach, Geiszler and Gottlieb are both well aware that their most significant contribution to science and, indeed, humanity, has tied both their lives and legacies together._

-

They have each other in their heads now, is the thing.

-

Hedda Gottlieb had wanted to dance, had wanted to fly, had wanted to go to space.

She was a very ambitious child, naturally.

In the end, she did none of those things. But she did work, she did think.

And of course, she helped defeat aliens and save the world, which frankly, Hedda thought, was no small accomplishment.

( _Rockstars_ , Newt insists.)

-

She was born in Bonn in 1989, in the spring. An important year for the world. _Born for a new beginning_ , Hedda's mother used to whisper dreamily, almost giddy, hugging Hedda from behind and holding her up to gaze at the stars.

The Berlin Wall fell that autumn; Hedda only ever knew reunified Germany. Perhaps that's why she never understood the Anti-Kaiju Wall. For Hedda, walls did not necessarily entail permanence and the world was better for that.

-

Newt was born in Berlin, in the winter, after the Wall came down. Born only six months later, but into a new world. Born at the beginning of new decade, a new era, while Hedda's birth came just before an ending. Maybe there's meaning there, but only the kind poets would find, not scientists.

-

Hedda had been born blond and blue-eyed, like her father, like her older brother. Neither lasted very long. The eyes changed first and the hair followed a few years later.

Everyone always said she looked just like her mother (or, they murmured under their breath, to themselves, she would if, if, if) and Hedda took it as a compliment, whether it was meant as one or not.

-

Newt looks like his mom, too, but he's an only child. The bad eyesight and his laugh, that came from his dad. His mind's his own, for better or worse. He thinks the same’s true for Hedda, whatever misguided conceptions of genetics and lineage and legacy are caught up in her head, but mostly he never had time to think about it because of the impending end of the world, and it’s not like he didn’t know who her dad was when they met.

-

Hedda's mother was different than the mothers of Hedda's schoolmates. Most obviously, she wasn’t German. She worked for the British embassy and despite her near perfect accent, she still referred to Yorkshire as 'home', but in a no-nonsense sort of way.

When Hedda was a child, Granny and Granddad visited once a year, in the summer. They didn't entirely approve of Papa, Hedda could tell, even though her brother Werner was always telling her, _shut up, you're wrong_.

Papa didn't particularly care for Granny and Granddad either and Mum and he fought about it, sometimes.

Papa didn't have much patience for people who didn't think as fast as him, people who couldn't. And most people couldn't.

Hedda got his irritability, his stubbornness and no small part of his intellectual brilliance, but Werner got his pride and his drive. 

Little Annika, who looked most like Papa, was sweet and calm and forgiving, like her name. Hedda loved her and Mum best, though she knew not to say that.

-

Newt meets Annika, in New York, in the spring of 2019. He and Hedda are both just passing through to brief important people on even more important things, to beg for more funding, essentially. Hedda's sharp-smart, has a talent for smacking people over the head with numbers until they give in and has a name with standing in certain circles; Newt's a genius with conviction, so Newt's convinced they'll get it, but on the other hand there are rumors, Hedda insists, that the U.N. wants to stop building after the Mark Vs, which is ridiculous.

Annika is tall and blonde and goes by Annika, not Annie or Ann - that's when he sees the family resemblance - and more than all that, she is worried about her older sister.

"You have worked with her for a few years now," Annika says seriously, when Hedda gets called away to talk to some super British expert in whatever the fuck. "Is she doing well? Is she safe?"

 _No_ , Newt wants to say, _super, definitely not. No one is, no matter what they’re pretending and isn’t that something?_ He wants to avoid the question because yeah, he’s known Hedda a while now but even on the best of days Hedda acts like she’s decades older than him and ages more wise in the world, and it’s super condescending. Newt would almost say that it’s a miracle that they’re getting along well enough right now for Hedda to let Newt meet her sister at all but Newt doesn’t believe in miracles. Their current detente has more to do with the fact that they haven’t seen each other in six months than any higher power. Hedda’s always nicer to him when she’s had time to forget how annoying she finds him seventy-five percent of the time.

“Um, I mean, I’m in Lima right now, so I don’t know really know what Hedda’s up to but she’s around Jaegers pretty much all the time,” Newt says, “and it doesn’t really get safer than that, right?”

Annika sighs and, again, Newt thinks that the Gottlieb sisters have more common than it initially appears.

-

Hedda grew up reading biographies of inventors (she loved the Wright brothers, especially) and explorers (astronauts, cosmonauts, either, both, those were the best, though she liked the polar expeditions too). She devoured the E. Nesbit books her mum remembered from her own childhood. She read science fiction stalwarts and tried to build robots of her own.

She read in German and English too. Her mum taught her some basic French and she learned quickly. She learned everything quickly. She thought at first that it made Werner angry, but she only had one friend, really, and he had many and she thought maybe it mostly just worried him.

Her parents and her teachers agreed, she was a very, very clever girl, far more advanced than her age. Papa thought she needed more, to be pushed further. Her mother was ambivalent.

Hedda split the difference by reading everything, stories and facts, fairytales and physics.

When Werner read _Harry Potter_ , Hedda did too, and then she re-read it and re-read it, until the spine began to crack and she longed for next book (it was out already, in England, couldn't Granny ship it?).

At eight, Hedda certainly didn't believe in magic (preposterous), but she believed in math and science and beauty and possibility and Hermione Granger.

-

In the fall of 2017, when they’re all in Tokyo, when it’s so late it’s already morning, Newt and Tendo start reminiscing in the mess hall about _Harry Potter_ , talking about how they’ve got to find a copy for Mako, _cuz no way is that kid going to grow up that deprived_ if Newt has any say in the matter. Hedda’s probably there because Tendo used his magical persuasion powers. Tendo and Hedda get along pretty well, because they both geek out over coding and tech and tactics and Newt thinks sometimes they go to church together, which is . . . something anyway.

“I have one. I have the whole series,” Hedda says, still looking half-asleep.

“Dude, seriously?” Newt asks, because it’s been two years they’ve known each other and he bought black market chocolate for her once and yet somehow this has _never come up_ , which is a fucking travesty. “Have you been lugging them around with all your other shit?”

Hedda raises an utterly disdainful eyebrow. “Yes, because obviously I have that kind of room. No, you imbecile,” (and here Tendo laughs, the traitor), “I meant I have them on my tablet. I had forgotten until now.”

“You forgot _Harry Potter_?” Newt asks, incredulous.

“Yes, with the copious amounts of time I have for pleasure reading, it slipped my mind,” Hedda replies. She turns to Tendo then and says, “I’ll send them to Marshall Pentecost, if he’s alright with that.”

“Yeah,” Tendo smiles, “do that. He’s always looking for new stuff for her.”

Newt goggles a little. “This is blowing my mind. Hedda Gottlieb was once a kid who liked _Harry Potter_. I swear, sometimes it’s like you’re a stranger to me.”

At that, Hedda gets up from the table, cradling her tea and her well-developed sense of superiority, and says, “And I prefer it that way. Tendo, Newton. Good night.”

For a woman who’s always complaining about how overdramatic Newt’s being, Hedda has a pretty good sense of timing.

-

Hedda always knew she was her father's child, in many ways. She loved numbers like him and she loved it more when he would give her problems and she and Werner and Papa would sit down at the table, all scribbling away.

But she loved other things too, like the ballet and God and computers and the line of jets taking off at the airport and that Papa didn't understand. He didn't see the precision and detail and awe involved in making, in the belief in those things, only that such things were a waste of a brilliant mind, of a bright future. He saw a tremendous intelligence and Hedda had that, true, but she was a child in other ways still and she wanted to build model planes and dance in _The Nutcracker_.

Hedda loved her father and almost forgave him his unyielding ambitions (for himself, for her) because she was also her mother’s child, but she did not absolve him.

The Breach in the Pacific became the ultimate rift in their relationship, but that comes later (it’s harder, sometimes, thinking linearly, now; her mind wants to jump in ways that don’t belong to her, skip steps she prefers to write out).

-

K-Science (because that’s what everyone calls the Research Division even though half of them wouldn’t touch a kaiju organ for love or money because it’s not, not their field), like the rest of the world, has their own favorite pilots.

Everyone loves Mako the best, of course, even if she hasn’t gotten into a Conn-Pod yet. But that’s because half of K-Science (and really, that’s just about all that’s left of the department, because apparently now that work’s started on the Wall, K-Science is no longer a priority) remembers her growing up amidst the carefully controlled chaos of the war effort, remembers the footage of her, blue jacket like a beacon against the rubble. She’s a person and a symbol, just like her dad.

It’s second place that’s up for grabs. Newt likes the Russians because well, Cherno Alpha mostly, but also because they’re hardcore in work and play and they wear corresponding hilarious gold chains with absolutely no sense of irony and Newt admires that in a couple.

Hedda’s almost friendly with Herc Hansen, though Newt would never really classify either of them as friendly. Newt figures they do their half-grimace and nod routine because they remember each other from the old days.

Hedda actually is friendly with Chuck Hansen.

Which.

Newt absolutely does not get. The kid’s a hero or whatever and a good Ranger but he’s also kind of a dick. 

“Seriously, Hedda, if I said half the shit Chuck Hansen does, you would’ve brained me already,” Newt helpfully points out.

Hedda looks down her nose at him (it has to be some of kind of talent because they are _exactly the same height_ ), utterly withering, like every character Dame Maggie Smith ever played.

“Chuck Hansen is young. He can still be taught. Whereas you have clearly proven yourself to be a lost cause,” Hedda sniffs, turning back to her blackboards and nearly smacking Newt in the face with her braid.

“Maybe I’ve already learned everything I need to know,” Newt shoots back. It’s not his best attempt but he did just nearly get brained by hair.

“You _would_ say that,” Hedda mutters, and then she adjusts her glasses and frowns and starts to write, off in her math mind palace. Newt could pretty much blow up the specimen he’s working on now and she wouldn’t even notice.

The thing is, Newt is a genius and it doesn’t even take a genius to figure it out. Hedda likes the Mark I pilots best, because they started together and they are so few of them left. (Tamsin Sevier was her favorite, once upon a time, but after Tokyo, Hedda avoided her, couldn’t look her in the eye because she certainly hadn’t suggested nuclear cores but she’d not objected as she should have.) She’s nicest to the youngest ones because before the world went to shit, Hedda had a reputation for being a pretty good teacher. And because she’s still an older sister.

-

Papa didn’t believe in God, but Mum did. Werner didn’t really care and Annika was too little to question things like that. They only ever went to church for Christmas and Easter, when they went to visit Grandmother and Grandfather, down by the Austrian border. They had to wear nice clothes and Grandmother showed Hedda how to properly iron pleats.

Hedda was always a believer; she knew it from the stars, even though Werner said _that doesn’t make sense_. But the stars made her feel small, small and remarkable and excited and they existed there because of the Big Bang, billions of years ago and when she looked at them, she believed.

She always understood God, but she had to learn about religion.

Hedda read all the way through the Bible when she was nine and mostly it was confusing. She liked some of the stories, like Ruth and Naomi, but she didn’t think it was a terribly convincing argument for the existence of a higher power.

If they had been aiming for clarity, they should have used _phi_ , the Fibonacci sequence, used the infinite possibility of space, Hedda told her mother.

Mum laughed and agreed, said, “Only don’t say that to your grandparents.”

“Why does Papa let them make him go to church when he doesn’t believe in God?” Hedda asked. She never liked the unsolved question, the paradoxes, but felt driven to solve them.

“Oh,” her mother mused, “well, they’re still his parents, so you know, he wants to make them happy.”

Hedda nodded and considered this. It didn’t make sense, but then Hedda did illogical things for her mother all the time.

-

Newt doesn’t get it, not about God, anyway. He can buy the ballet because she would be into uptight art - and it’s sad, okay, to think about a little girl Hedda who wanted to being a math child prodigy prima ballerina so he’s glad, really, that he didn’t know before - and he knows about Hedda’s thing for planes and other flying things (it’s why Tendo has her up in LOCCENT when she’s free, like the giant robot auxiliary corps version of air traffic control) and she coded for the Mark I, way back at the beginning, before Newt even got in with the PPDC.

But he doesn’t get it about God.

Hedda drops divinity into her phrases sometimes, when she’s particularly absorbed, particularly convinced about something.

It’s completely baffling, because she’s the one who always needs proof, and yet she believes in God, even though she hates the kaiju with the vehemence of a hardened soldier.

After the Drift, he thinks like her sometimes, sees something extraordinary in the bizarre, improbable survival of people, in perfectly balanced equations and well put together machines.

He’s never going to believe, but they both have a better idea of how truly, unfathomably large space is, now.

-

It was her mother who styled Hedda's hair into perfect buns and took her to dance class, three days a week. Annika preferred her piano lessons.

In the studio, it did not matter so much that Hedda's mind whirred faster than her classmates', that she knew answers even as the questions were still being asked.

Dancing, she could be grace itself.

(Later, shuttled from Shatterdome to Shatterdome, she plays Tschaikovsky on the nights she can’t sleep for the noise, the way the sound of even one dropped pen reverberates off metal walls.)

-

Newt has six doctorates because fuck you, that’s why, and one of them is in musical composition.

That’s the one that took the longest to get, actually.

Take that as you will.

Or, take that as a criticism of the way academia and art interact, because Newt has a been a genius and a musician his whole life.

-

Hedda was ten and had just started school at a Gymnasium (a day student, which was good and bad) when her parents divorced. It surprised no one, really. Werner, at twelve, was away, at boarding school in the U.K. (and they had fought about that, too, about whether Werner needed structure or familiarity, and the compromise had been to send him further away), when it happened.

He was angrier than Hedda and Annika combined.

The problem, Hedda thought, was that Werner was always too buried in his own convictions to see the obvious.

Annika, only seven, was sad, though, and that made Hedda sad, too, even though really she felt relieved and a bit guilty for being relieved.

(She was sure she would be better at loving her father from a distance and she was mostly right.)

-

Newt moves Shatterdomes more frequently than a lot of K-Science because he requires fresh specimens and shipping is like, the biggest hassle ever, since no one wants to handle kaiju bits because they’re irrationally afraid.

“Irrationally? Irrationally?” Hedda explodes, at lunch.

Newt had, until now, vague plans to be civil at least for the next week before he shipped out because Hedda’s miles better than some people Newt’s been stuck with (and because on the rare occasions they’re really getting along, it’s kind of awesome and everyone stares at them like they’ve spotted a live dodo or something), but Hedda and he are rarely, if ever, on the same page.

“Considering the extreme environmental degradation and the health hazards associated with - “

“Okay, seriously, Hedda, not what I meant - “

“There are proper safety precautions and frankly, given your blatant disregard for them, it’s amazing you’re still alive!” Hedda huffs and abandons their table, one hand gripping her cane tightly.

“You are just asking to get shanked, boy,” Tendo grins.

“Whatever, I’m out of here in a week. If she can’t keep herself from having an aneurysm in that time, it’s not my fault,” Newt says.

-

They moved to London a year after the divorce was finalized, Hedda and Mum and Annika. Hedda and Annika got out of school for the summer holidays, got on a plane with Mum and left. Their father drove them all to the airport. He didn’t come inside, but they all kissed him on the cheek, even Mum, to say good bye.

They joined Werner at Aunt Felicity’s house in Reading, for a few weeks, before they found a place of their own in London. Aunt Felicity was Hedda’s favorite aunt; Tante Hilde and Tante Hanna both thought Hedda _needed to be more sociable_. Aunt Felicity gave Hedda books on the history of science and math and her partner Kasumi told them about the strange parasites she studied.

Mum was efficient and found a new place within a few weeks. It was an apartment; Hedda and Annika had to share a room, at least until Werner went back to school.

Annika still used the German words for things she didn't know in English, so Hedda carried around a pocket German-English dictionary for when Werner or Mum weren't around (Mum was interviewing for jobs and Werner had friends, probably) and watched movies for the slang. Most of it seemed absurd and she preferred the printed word, preferred C.S. Lewis and the _London Review of Books_ and old things like Isaac Newton and Shakespeare.

She and Annika spent their summer copying the radio announcers on the BBC, repeating the names of places they had to hunt down on maps they bought half off from the stationery store down the street. The owners explained that they were from Bangladesh, which was one of those places in the news, sometimes, and they pointed it out. 

Hedda lost her accent quickly. She made a point of it.

-

Newt thinks in English, mostly. He primarily uses German to swear and lob insults and when he’s very, very tired.

All of those habits come under heavy scrutiny when Hedda Gottlieb’s around. She’s hardly the only other German with the PPDC (they are called Jaegers), or even just in K-Science, but she _judges_ him harder than the rest, even though she’s straight out of a stuffy British boarding school drama (admittedly, she’s probably one of the teachers that everyone secretly wants to get with).

Newt’s not sure exactly what she does, other than stare down her students, Newt in particular, in the Jaeger Academy (why Kodiak Island, Alaska, which Newt had never heard of before, of all the places on Earth?). She’s part of some team that does numbers stuff and code, he thinks. Newt has vague recollections of people pointing her out at conferences and they’ve been introduced, he’s pretty sure, Before, but their fields don’t overlap.

She’s Lars Gottlieb’s daughter, though, which is weird, because there’s rumors he doesn’t like the Jaeger project, something about the Pons system bothering him. But Hedda, she’s PPDC and proud.

“She is angry, like, literally all the time,” Newt marvels. “You think it’s the weather?”

Priya Patel, who’s in engineering and likes Newt only marginally more than Hedda Gottlieb does, says, “No, it is that she is working many hours to build Jaegers and you annoy her. She does not like you.”

“Um, okay, I do nothing to provoke her,” Newt says, although, yeah, that’s a lie, but provocation is in his nature.

“I have known Hedda Gottlieb for far longer than you have,” Priya says. “She deserves your respect. And we are here to learn.”

Newt’s never been good at keeping his head down though.

-

Hedda didn't get sent to boarding school because Mum thought _it wouldn't be good for her_ but she does go to an expensive, posh school for the children of diplomats and influential people because her father was world-renowned in his field and he wouldn't stand for something less. Annika and she won partial scholarships. Hedda wore a uniform with a pleated skirt and a button down shirt and a blazer and tie and she hated the tie but didn’t mind the rest so much.

That first year, Hedda made few friends (in fact, most of the girls, older than her and thus annoyed, actively disliked Hedda) and far fewer she spoke to outside of class, but she studied Latin and physics, literature and astronomy and learned to always wear coats with hoods or else carry an umbrella.

She took the Underground home from school with Annika, on their own, because Mum got a new job and at twelve, Hedda’s old enough to take care of her little sister. Mum worried about them, often, but Hedda was good at maintaining their routine.

When they got home, Hedda would make toast and tea or cheese sandwiches and tea and carefully spread her work out on the table.

In the evenings, Annika and Hedda watched _Star Trek: Voyager_ (Captain Janeway looked like their Aunt Felicity, a bit, and had her dignity and Annika had a name twin), or the _X-Files_ , or _The West Wing_ , if it was Mum’s night.

Papa called on Sunday afternoons and asked almost the same exact set of questions, every week. Annika wrote down interesting things that had happened to tell him. Hedda told him about school.

-

It’s the summer 2021, Newt’s been with the PPDC five years (four and half? almost six? It’s hard to keep track of time by anything but kaiju now) and things are getting worse.

Newt talks to his parents often but irregularly. They’re used to it, even though they worry. He gets caught up in things and forgets to call and moves from ‘Dome to ‘Dome too often to designate any of them a homebase (Hong Kong, maybe, because that’s where he started out, where they keep him when there’s nothing new to send him out to). He always remembers to call at some point, anyway, and his parents are always, always worried for him but more than that, they are always, always terribly proud.

For a long time, Tendo is in Lima more often than not, but he’s also the Beckett brothers’ favorite J-Tech, and everyone wanted happy Rangers. After Gipsy Danger falls in Anchorage, Tendo goes where Marshall Pentecost does. It’s dangerous to play favorites with pilots, memos remind them (you could lose them so easily, they don’t say), so have faith in your jobs and your leaders. Newt doesn’t particularly admire the quasi-military schtick that dominates the Jaeger program, but he thinks if Tendo’s chosen his man, he’s probably chosen well. Plus he gets to hang out with Mako, who’s shaping up to be a seriously cool kid, not that Newt’s surprised by that (he did, after all, teach her anatomy and physiology himself). 

Hedda’s been Head of Breach Studies for the past three years. Newt’s pretty sure Upstairs invented the sub-department for her, because they don’t know what else to call what she does. She stays in the Eurasian Shatterdomes or Sydney, occasionally, as close as possible to the Breach.

Mako says she sees Hedda in Oblivion Bay every couple months, that Priya calls her in to help with the salvage job on Mark Is, because they’re hemorrhaging people from Engineering with the budget cuts. Priya would probably have gone ballistic on the U.N. by now if weren’t for Mako, who’s freakin’ seventeen and the steadiest person alive. “I have learned many new Gujarati words from Priya-ji,” Mako tells Newt over videochat, face carefully neutral except for her mischievous eyes.

Newt doesn’t have a lot of people in the PPDC he actively keeps track of, because transience is in the nature of the job, unless you’re local crew. The constant emails and memos and notes pretty much mean he could locate anyone if he wanted to, but he always asks after Tendo, and everyone always feels the need to warn him about Hedda. Their disagreements have become transcontinental office gossip, and that makes it feel a lot like Newt never left MIT at all.

-

Each year, Hedda, Werner and Annika spent their Easter holidays and the month of July in Berlin, with their father. He moved, too, after they did. The Berlin Institute of Technology was only too glad to welcome Lars Gottlieb onto the faculty.

Papa was a very good cook, but a very busy man and Werner didn't like to follow recipes, liked to experiment and so was useless for anything more complicated than eggs. Hedda learned to cook the summer after she turned fourteen, with help from the internet and Frau Schmidt next door. Annika liked to sit on a stool, holding the recipe and giving imperious directions.

Papa and Werner eat their concoctions dutifully, if dubiously.

Sometimes Papa brought them all through the university grounds on their way to some outing, the zoo or a park or museum, perhaps. Every time, someone along the way stopped him, wanted to speak for a moment to Herr Doktor Gottlieb about something or the other. It made his graduate students look at him with awe, but it merely made Hedda impatient.

“Slow down, we have time,” Werner said over and over.

Hedda disliked being made to wait though, like a child, when at home in London she was trusted, at least, to care for herself.

-

Newt’s family moves to America when he’s six.

Internet companies are booming and the president plays saxophone and it’s awesome. America is awesome.

They go to the outskirts of Los Angeles and they move a few times after that, Chicago, New York, Boston, following the music and the trail of people willing to indulge their son’s impossible brain back East, but never back across the Atlantic.

His parents settle in Portland, Maine, eventually, but Newt’s at MIT by then and living in the dorms (they stay in Boston until he turns seventeen, until he says, _that’s enough, I’m fine, Mutti, Vati, you can go_ , and because they love him, they give him the benefit of the doubt).

He gets older, remembering Berlin in broad watercolor strokes, as wonderful but not really home, anymore.

Now he sees it in double and dreams about it, mirror cities melting together.

-

Papa remarried when Hedda was fifteen.

His new wife was a delicate, bird-like mathematician who had trained at the Sorbonne and was only twenty-nine. Just twelve years older than Werner.

It was such an awful cliche that Hedda had thought, for a moment, her father was having one of those mid-life crises when he’d said he was going to ask Vivienne to marry him. But that would, of course, be too pedestrian for Lars Gottlieb.

Werner knew Vivienne best, so he simply shrugged and offered congratulations. He had figured out that something was going on, Hedda suspected. He was better at reading people than her and Annika, only twelve, after all, was willfully blind about their father.

“At least,” Hedda concluded, after some thought, “she wasn’t his student.”

Mum laughed out loud at that.

Annika was irate though. “How can you all be laughing at this? This is terrible. He is acting like a child!”

Mum laughed again and then apologized, “Oh, darling, we’re sorry for laughing, we are. But you have to understand, your father, God love him, is an egotist. He doesn’t have a Nobel yet, but now he will have a pretty, young wife.”

“She does have a doctorate of her own, Mum,” Werner pointed out.

“Yes, that, too,” Mum agreed. “We mustn’t forget that. You’re right, Werner, we shouldn’t be rude. I’m sure she’s a perfectly lovely person. Now, what shall we have for dinner tonight?”

Annika stormed off at that and Werner shrugged and went back to his biology textbook.

“Shall we do stir-fry, Mum? I would like broccoli,” Hedda said, feeling oddly calm.

In the kitchen, cutting ginger into nearly uniform cubes, Hedda asked, “Would you like a boyfriend, Mum?” She quickly considered and added, “Or a girlfriend?”

“Oh, well, let’s not give Annika any more of a shock today,” Mum said, sounding mildly surprised.

“Mother.”

Mum laughed again. “You’re so serious, Hedda, sweetheart. Are you worried about me?”

Hedda looked down at the cutting board. “I _am_ your daughter.”

“Ah,” Mum said, eyebrows raised in faux shock, “so you are!” She turned back to the stove, saying, “I hardly have the time for romance of any kind. Nor do I especially want one, to be entirely frank.”

“I don’t want you to feel alone,” Hedda admitted, finally, in German.

Mum smiled gently. “I don’t.”

-

When Newt gets to the Tokyo Shatterdome after another four month stint in Hong Kong, Mako comes out to meet him on the helipad with a small smile and a brief hug. She just got back from the Jaeger Academy few weeks ago and Newt’s glad not to have missed her. 

“Wow, look at you, kiddo! You’re even bigger than the last time I saw you! How old are you now? Twelve? Thirteen?”

Mako smiles and shakes her head, playing along. “I am fifteen!”

“Fifteen?” Newt exclaims, putting his hand over his heart. “You’re practically a dinosaur! You better slow down.”

Mako shakes her head again, still smiling, and then leads him inside. When they get off the elevator, Hedda is waiting, looking almost relaxed.

“Hedda Gottlieb, am I going crazy or do you look happy to see me?” Newt asks, throwing his arms out. There’s something utterly satisfying in eliciting annoyance from Hedda; Newt’s functionally homeless because of his work with the PPDC, but this feels homey.

Hedda rolls her eyes (she’s secretly amused, Newt is confident of it) and says, “Happy to see Miss Mori, rather.” She turns to Mako with a slight bow and says, “I believe Dr. Makeba is in search of you.”

Mako smiles at Newt, bows to Hedda and scampers off.

“The girlfriend’s in town? No wonder you’re so happy,” Newt grins.

Hedda shakes her head and starts walking off without looking to see if he’s following, as per usual.

“Please stop trying to pry into my personal life, Newton. I don’t ask about yours.”

“Right, but that’s because you don’t care about my personal life unless it gets in the way of your work, whereas I am naturally inquisitive.”

Hedda abruptly stops in her tracks and Newt stumbles, trying not to fall over her or her cane.

“I knew it!” Hedda exclaims. “I knew you slept with Pilar Quispe! You know she’s left to teach at the Jaeger Academy?”

“Um, okay, no, I did not, but I don’t actually see what that has to my sleeping with her. Are you seeing a logical progression here, Hedda? Because I’m not.”

“She was my best particle physicist, Newton!” Hedda almost groans, not that she ever shows the full range of human emotion. “Why could you not just have refrained? Or at least chosen Victor Bloom? I would have been well rid of him.”

“Yeah,” Newt shrugs. “Really don’t think her decision making process was actually related to her getting all up in this.”

Hedda mutters, “No, I imagine it was more to do with your glowing personality.”

“Or maybe she just really likes snow,” Newt replies. “And Victor? Really? Dude could clear a room with his pomposity alone. I’m not doing your dirty work for you. Ha, doing. That one wasn’t even intentional.”

“I. Just leave,” Hedda says, massaging her temple. “Find your lab yourself. It’s the same bloody one as last time.”

“Sure thing, Hedda! But seriously, tell me, you and Beatrice, before she got married, was that a thing? Because I feel like that was a thing.”

Hedda continued walking away, throwing her free hand up into the air, gesturing at nothing, muttering in German, “I truly don’t know what I was expecting.”

“You should not bait her,” Dr. Sato says from behind Newt.

Newt turns and grins. “But, Dr. Sato, it’s too easy!”

“I believe I am meant to oversee scientists, not children,” Sato says drily.

“You like us, really.”

Sato nods, thoughtfully. “Yes. This is true. Evidently more than Dr. Quispe liked you.” And then he walks off, humming to himself, the sly bastard. 

-

Hedda entered Oxford at sixteen. She went in for a dual Bachelor’s/Master’s program in physics and philosophy because she loved how easily Descartes and Newton and the Enlightenment scientists went back and forth, to and fro, between them, like there were no boundaries on their minds.

Her father had thought she could have started university earlier, and had expected (perhaps hoped) she would join him in Berlin, the way Werner had. Oxford, he allowed for, but philosophy disappointed him.

“Why are you wasting your time on this?” he demanded over the phone.

“It is not a waste of time, Papa. And I have already decided.”

And, perhaps because he had a newborn son keeping him up at all hours, Papa didn’t push any further. (Hedda was always rather grateful to little Stefan for being such a distraction, even if he and Marcel, born two years later, could be awful pests.)

She went to Oxford and read astrophysics and feminism and got back at everyone who looked down on her by being better, more prepared and more precise. She dressed carefully, in collared shirts and crisp jackets, to make herself look older. She never blinked first.

She fell in love, or maybe as close to love as she could manage, not with a person (there was an infatuation with a graduate student who lead a discussion group; he had been in the army and still kept his hair close cropped and studied Voltaire and Rousseau, but ultimately Hedda never really knew him except as an idea), but a place and a time.

Hedda loved Oxford for its past, the aging dons and curiosities and the many feet that had trod the paths before her.

The world bore on, new discoveries were made, revolutions rose and fell, and Oxford remained.

-

Newt’s seventeen and working on his first Ph.D., in Biochemistry, and playing guitar in a punk rock band.

It’s a year before the first _Iron Man_ movie will come out, but he already thinks he’s Tony Stark, a little bit.

Some nights he can’t fall asleep, thinking _what if_ and in the morning, on the T, he wonders what the appropriate, what the correct thing to do with his hands is.

It’s not his best year, but it’s not his worst.

-

Hedda started going to church while at Oxford.

They read theology, occasionally, in her philosophy classes and it interested her, in a mostly detached way. She read Maimonides and thought, _ah, that’s interesting_.

Perhaps it was another rebellion, Hedda wasn’t sure.

Mostly she liked the feeling of the cathedral. Hedda did not, as a rule, believe in what she could not put into numbers or words, but she gave credit to architecture and candlelight.

She was at Balliol but liked Magdalen's singers the best.

Sometimes she sat in the pews with David, a slight, pale History D.Phil. candidate who was from Newcastle, like Hedda’s mother. They listened to the choristers practice. Afterward, David would take her for tea, because he had come to Oxford for the first time at seventeen and _it was rather a shock _. They were friends, Hedda thought, though they did not have much in common.__

__“Why do you come to the cathedral if you’re Jewish?” Hedda asked one day._ _

__“Why do you? You’re not Anglican either,” he countered. Then he shrugged his avian shoulders. “Oh, well, I’ve never been close to God. I imagine He appreciates any effort. Besides, I have a friend who prays. Now that I’m working on my dissertation, I felt the need to try it myself.”_ _

__“Is it working?”_ _

__David shrugged again. “I’m not sure, yet. I imagine that’s where the faith bit comes in.”_ _

__-_ _

__Here are some things Newt knows about Hedda, now:_ _

__He was right, she really, really does love chocolate - dark chocolate especially, bittersweet. When she stops to thinks about it, she misses a lot of things because of the rationing but there are days, few and far between, she misses chocolate ( _good_ chocolate) most of all._ _

__She started wearing high heels at Oxford, because they made her taller, the better to stare people down. She hated that she couldn’t walk faster in them but she loved the clicking sound they made, how they announced her presence before she arrived._ _

__After the accident, she started wearing Oxfords (the shoes) almost exclusively. This had the unintended effect of making her seem like a little bit of a hipster, what with her tendency to also wear slightly too large sweater vests and the fact that she chopped off most of her hair a few months after the accident. (It grew back curlier, which only made her look more like her mother.)_ _

__She hated the lingering pain in her hip on rainy or cold days but hated the possibility of addiction to her painkillers more. She also hated the show House, M.D., on principle, though she had never watched it._ _

__Here is an incomplete list of things Hedda now knows about Newt:_ _

__His six doctorates, in order of completion, are: biochemistry, comparative physiology, evolutionary biology, musical composition, biotechnology, and astrobiology, because Newt believes in doing what you love and not letting the system suck the fun out of it. Though he enjoyed completing the musical composition one way less than he anticipated. And the astrobiology one was unplanned, the result of the kaiju. He loves of all of his subjects, wholly and fully, but he never felt as _called_ to something as he did when the kaiju came._ _

He has a love/hate relationship with Mary Shelley’s _Frankenstein_. 

He doesn’t think about his ex-boyfriend (the more-or-less steady one, the BU lit student) that much and sometimes when he does, he feels guilty for not even knowing if he’s still alive (but then Boston is safe and Jack came from near Kansas City, so surely he has to be). It’s been almost ten years since Newt left, but it’s also been almost ten years since Newt had enough spare space in his brain to attempt something approximating a long-term relationship. 

__He doesn’t like heights that much; he’s not afraid of them but he’s always been a little baffled by rock climbers. He’s all for thrill-seeking but rock climbing just strikes him as kind of dumb. Humans weren’t built for that shit._ _

__-_ _

Hedda graduated with highest honors, naturally. She was a few weeks shy of twenty, with a Master’s from Oxford and she could do anything she bloody well wanted. 

She would miss Oxford but felt ready for the world. 

She chose Harvard and astronomy. She was going to strike out on her own. 

(She wonders, sometimes, what her life might have been like.) 

__-_ _

Objectively, Newt knows he works better when Hedda’s around because he always works better when he has to fight for it. 

He hates her a little, sometimes (not actually), for hating him (she doesn’t, not really, he knows that, but sometimes she looks at his arms and he sees horror in her eyes, the thought that one day he’s going to run out of room on his body and they’ll all die, die, die). He hates that she’s just as unwilling to admit that he makes her sharper, too. 

There’s a reason, more than politics, more than money, more fear. There’s a reason they’re the last ones still here when everyone else is gone. 

They’re an orbit unto themselves, unstable and sparking and Newt’s mixing metaphors but the world could very well end unless he and Hedda can find something, anything, to put humanity one step ahead when he’s pretty sure they’ve been ten steps behind this whole time. 

They need each other, Newt and Hedda, even if he thinks she’s wrong, she’s wrong because life can’t be packaged as neatly as she’s trying and certainly not the kaiju. They’re huge and they’re terrible and they’re wondrous and he’s sure, sure that if his new specimens would just come in already, he’d be able to slot in those last missing variables, find his long-awaited answers. 

They’re both stir-crazy, crowd-crazy because everyone who’s left is in Hong Kong now and all the lab space has been taken over as storage and even if it hadn’t been, they’ve got no techs left at all. Hedda draws a line down the middle of their shared space because she’s got control issues, even during the Apocalypse. 

And Raleigh Beckett’s coming home to the fold. At least Mako’s excited. Newt’s never seen her love a machine as much as she loves Danger. 

__-_ _

The accident happened in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. It was the August after she graduated from Oxford. She was visiting her grandparents with Werner and Annika; her grandmother was unwell, in the hospital. 

Hedda was crossing the street. There was a car and a bus and they collided and then they collided with Hedda. 

It was very improbable. Traffic accidents of that kind were rare in Germany. 

She was newly twenty. She had never owned a car. 

__Harvard was kind, of course, promised her she could join her program whenever she was ready._ _

__Her father stroked her hair and said, “You are alive and you have your mind. Everything else we can easily conquer.”_ _

It was kindness, but Hedda still turned away. 

__-_ _

“At the end of the year, we are both going to be promoted.” 

__“Huh?”_ _

__It’s November, 2023, close to Thanksgiving (when is Thanksgiving this year? He has to check, one of the American crews will remember - maybe he’ll go to Maine, surprise his parents) and Newt’s back in Hong Kong for the time being._ _

__Hedda looks tired and drawn._ _

(There are fewer and fewer working Jaegers and back in Vladivostok, Priya had said, quietly, putting her hand on Newt’s upper arm, “Before you leave for Hong Kong, I want you to know - because I am sure you did not read the memos yourself - with the budget cuts, they’ve dumped what was left of the Oceanography team, Beatrice included. And Mateo quit.” 

“So the entire - wait, Mateo _quit_?” 

“Apparently he does not think there is a future in PPDC, with so much of our funding gone.” 

__“Uh, does he really think there’s any kind of future at all without us?”_ _

__“Newton, I am trying to tell you - “_ _

__“I get it. I get it.”)_ _

__Her best friends are half way around the world from her, one of them summarily fired because the world’s politicians can’t get their heads out of their asses and the other dangerously overextended because again, people are generally idiots._ _

__Additionally, Newt is now like ninety-five percent sure that Hedda had been hooking up with Admittedly Hot Mateo, deserter extraordinaire, because he’s not sure why Priya would’ve mentioned it otherwise. (Newt always kind of thought Mateo was a bit of a smug dick and basically glorified tech help, but no one ever asked him, so.)_ _

__To summarize, it’s been a bad fucking month for K-Science, but especially for Hedda._ _

__“At the end of the year, we are both going to get promoted,” Hedda repeats._ _

__“Uh.”_ _

__Hedda massages her temple and presses on. “Doctor Sato and Doctor Reyes are being forced to step down.”_ _

__Newt splutters. Sato and Reyes have been running K-Science together since Schoenfeld and Lightcap moved on and nothing makes sense._ _

__“I’m a terrible administrator,” Newt finally blurts out._ _

Hedda lets out a laugh, for a split second, accompanied by crazy eyes, and for the first time, Newt really, truly thinks, _we’re losing, ohmygod, we’re losing_. 

__“Trust me, Newton, I’m well aware. But there’s not much left to administer over and as it is, we’re about the only option left.”_ _

__“Wow. We’re fucked.”_ _

__“Indeed.”_ _

__(The promotions come through in January. They really never do much administrating at all; their titles are hollow and most of their staff gets forced to close up shop and instead help the PPDC close Shatterdome after Shatterdome, shipping equipment off to universities or abandoning it to be scavenged._ _

__They are the last ones standing.)_ _

__-_ _

__Perhaps it was a cliché, but Hedda was so angry, after the accident._ _

__Angry at the doctors, at the physical therapists, at her parents for preparing her for so much but not this, never this._ _

__The only ones Hedda could muster any patience for were Stefan and Marcel, the little half-brothers she had never taken the time to consider as whole little people, who climbed onto her bed and demanded she read to them. They were children and did not understand what was wrong with her._ _

__She turned down Harvard._ _

__“Darling, don’t you want to think this over?” Mum asked._ _

“No,” Hedda said. “I don’t want their pity.” She meant that she could not ruin the possibility that Harvard had been (a new continent, the New World, adulthood on her own terms without the messy familial entanglements staying in Europe entailed). She would rather leave it untouched, unsullied. 

She lost a year learning to walk again. A year coming back to herself, different. She sat in cafés, reading poetry that once interested if ultimately never satisfied her, and failed to find any answers. She watched politicians on televisions and felt them petty and herself apathetic or angry (always angry). 

__Some things had been burned out of her._ _

__Only planes and rockets and equations and the natural laws to which all things on Earth were subject remained steady, certain, clear._ _

__She directed Stefan and Marcel on how to build the best Lego towers and space stations._ _

__She tutored self-absorbed schoolchildren obsessed with pop stars in mathematics._ _

__She applied again to graduate school, for mechanical engineering and applied sciences rather than astronomy._ _

__Mum worried about that, too._ _

__“I realized I want to build things, is all, Mum,” Hedda told her and it wasn’t a lie, exactly._ _

__She chose Berlin Tech, despite or perhaps because of her father’s shadow. In Berlin, she learned to walk again, and occasionally to smile. The city had earned her loyalty for the time being._ _

__-_ _

__Newt lands in Anchorage in August, 2016, three months after Brawler Yukon takes down Karloff._ _

__They close the Breach in January, 2025._ _

Nine and a half years. He gives the PPDC nine and a half years and the Jaegers give everyone back the world. 

He can tell when Hedda’s close without having to turn around, has a sixth sense purely reserved for her, now. Regular, properly overseen Drifts with another person, people prepared for it, can go wrong and everyone, once things have calmed, says, _it’s amazing you both survived_ and they both reach up to touch their bloody, scarred eyes at the same time. 

At night he dreams about the hivemind and they are so _angry_ and in the morning he sees his nightmares reflected on Hedda’s face. 

Two weeks after the world is reborn and the Shatterdome’s still part euphoria, part ‘what do we do next?’ Newt and Hedda have orders from Upstairs to stay put; no one’s quite sure yet what it is they’ve done to their brains and they can’t be put in front of the press if they’re insane. They don’t get go home to their parents, either. Instead, they’re put through test after test, brain scans, eye exams, the whole gamut. 

It’s not that he can tell what Hedda’s thinking but they get flashes of each other, sometimes, and Hedda’s started pushing frustrated hands through her hair like Newt would (it makes her look messier, wilder, and Newt wants to touch, to smooth down errant wisps or to undo her braid entirely; he wants to feel the texture of her heavy curls under his fingers and she _knows_ it, and an entire race of aliens knows it, too). 

_He loves her, he loved her, he will love her._

He conjugates in the Latin she learned, years ago. 

She tries not to think about J. Robert Oppenheimer and fails. (Shoenfeld thought he would be the one compared for the rest of history, however long that might be, but Newt and Hedda, they know who they destroyed, they know intimately and terribly and sometimes Newt thinks no one has ever believed in humanity like they have.) 

____-_ _ _ _

Hedda went in for aeronautical engineering, with a side of astrophysics, at TU Berlin, because she had changed, but she had not entirely given up on space. 

Vivienne visited her at least once a week, stopping by with the children. She was well-meaning, most likely, but it was enough to make Hedda want to tear her hair out. 

“You know I have never approved of your behavior towards her,” Hedda said over the phone to Annika, “but I don’t think I ever understood before. It is as if she can’t comprehend that I am too old to need that kind of mothering! And even if I did, I already have a mother for that!” 

“For a nice person, she can be unintentionally quite awful,” Annika agreed. 

“And Papa is worse! I can’t do a single thing at university without someone mentioning his name. He doesn’t even have to be there in person to make things difficult.” 

“So, come home,” Annika said. “Just come home.” 

It wasn’t as simple as that, but Hedda did her best anyway. Berlin brought her back to life, but it did not make her happy. 

Cambridge University was pleased to have her every other semester and Hedda suspected Berlin was happy to see less of her. 

She met Priya Patel at Cambridge and started the first great partnership of her life. Priya was visiting from IIT, Delhi, and together she and Hedda spoke so fast that their carefully maintained accents in English deteriorated and neither cared because numbers and physics and dreams were universal. Hedda had never liked someone she was not related to so much. 

At Cambridge she also had her first kiss, her first boyfriend and her first time. But all that was far more forgettable. (He had been kind, patient, and most importantly, respectful. He had looked at her eyes, not her cane, but had expectations Hedda was uninterested in fulfilling. He didn’t break her heart, but that in itself disappointed her, in a way, because she had nearly loved him.) 

____-_ _ _ _

They start building the modified helicopters on Kodiak Island a few weeks after Newt gets started at the Academy. 

One of the J-Tech/Local Command ( _LOCCENT, Newt, get with the program_ ) guys, Tendo Choi, is working on the project with Hedda Gottlieb and some really peaky looking engineers. Tendo’s going to be moved down to the new Lima Shatterdome in a few weeks and doesn’t look any older than Newt’s students (then again, Newt’s barely older than his own students) but is a lot more fun. 

“We need a better deployment system,” Tendo explains. “Just having the Jaegers walk out of the Domes through the ocean doesn’t make a lot of sense.” 

“Inefficient,” Hedda mutters, half-hidden behind stacks of blueprints, a huge mug of tea and several engineers who seriously look like they want to go to sleep and possibly never wake up again. 

____“Yeah,” Tendo continues, “so we’ve been airlifting them out, but we figured we should have our own machines for that. So these babies are built to carry the Jaegers. They’re gonna pick them up, drop them, and get the hell out of Dodge.” He gives a kind of bloody-minded grin that Newt tentatively returns._ _ _ _

“Apparently the Director’s kid says we oughtta name them for the first flight, like Kitty Hawk or something.” Tendo turns to Hedda and asks, “What do you think, Doc?” 

Hedda looks up, glasses slipping down her nose and repeats, “Kitty Hawk,” eyes distant. “Yes, I agree.” 

There, at that moment, Newt thinks, _you and me, we’re gonna be friends, even if it drives us both off a cliff_. 

“It’s decided, then,” Tendo declares. “The Jaeger Auxiliary Helicopters will be code named Gliding Katherines for Kitty Hawk and Jasper Shoenfeld officially has the most influential second-grader to ever walk the planet.” 

____-_ _ _ _

____Despite the detours, Hedda received her doctorate in June of 2013, two weeks after her twenty-fourth birthday._ _ _ _

____She had several offers, in Britain and Germany, and fielded a few calls from aeronautics firms._ _ _ _

She went back to London and took a teaching post at UCL because Oxford did not have aeronautical engineering, Cambridge needed more experience and London was home and her mother and Annika. Her father shook his head and muttered about her squandering her potential, how she ought to have sought research positions. 

Hedda ignored him. 

(As it turned out, she didn’t teach for very long anyway.) 

____-_ _ _ _

Newt goes home at the beginning of February, the day after Hedda kisses him on the cheek, murmurs, “Do be careful, Newton. Make sure to call. And say hello to your parents for me,” and flies off for London. 

It’s the first time since since the Drift, since they closed the Breach, that they’ve been more than fifteen miles away from each other. It’s also the first time in four months that they’ve been more than fifteen miles away from each other. 

____There’s a phantom ache in his chest cavity and an emptiness at the back of his skull._ _ _ _

____Newt’s parents are there waiting when he lands in Boston. They wave heartily until he spots them and then sweep up, hold him tightly._ _ _ _

He sleeps almost the entire ride back to Portland, like he’s six, not thirty-six, waking briefly - the highway, his parents speaking quietly in German - and falling back asleep. Instead of nightmares, he dreams of walking across the Thames on the Millenium Bridge, until he’s on the banks of the Charles River in the autumn; Hedda’s with him, though he doesn’t see her. 

He wakes up as they turn onto the street his parents’ house is on. For the first time in a long time, he feels peaceful, well rested. 

Hedda calls, the next morning, well into afternoon already for her, and for a few stolen seconds, they just listen to each other breathe ( _you’re alive and so am I and so is the world_ ). 

____-_ _ _ _

Because it was summer and she had a few weeks before she was set to start teaching, Hedda wasn’t in London, wasn’t even in Europe at all on K-Day. She was in New York, for a conference, her first as a full Ph.D., and she had brought Annika with her, because she got so little time off from medical school and deserved a vacation. 

They watched the news from their hotel room, didn’t shut it off for nearly two straight days. 

Hedda, like everyone else, missed most of the conference. She didn’t even notice.

Because of the confusion and the terror, Hedda and Annika didn’t get back to London until ten days later, because the airlines first weren’t running, then were in high demand. Their mother abused her privileges as an employee of the British Home Office to get them on a flight and Annika gripped the armrest tightly for the whole first hour of the flight and Hedda disappeared into her own mind, even though neither of them had ever been afraid of flying before, had relished it, in fact. 

____-_ _ _ _

Newt’s weirdly settled in Cambridge, the perennial Ph.D. student, living in an apartment he’s been renting for the last three years. The guy at the bagel store asks about the classes Newt’s TAing this semester and whether he’s still playing electric bass and Newt has standard answers. 

Jack’s more or less his boyfriend; he only stays at his own place when he’s particularly busy or taking a disparaging comment Newt offhandedly made about a novel or an author (or God forbid, about Ernest Hemingway) too seriously. 

____Everything’s calm, clear skies for the foreseeable future and it makes Newt antsy, it makes the hair on the back of his neck stand up. He’s twenty-three and surely too young to have already become boring._ _ _ _

____Then K-Day happens. And Newt’s world spins on its axis._ _ _ _

They’re giant, beyond the imagination, not of this world. 

And Newt knows he was meant for this, meant to take them apart and find the answers. ( _Like finding God_ , Hedda says, and it’s not that, he doesn’t think they’re God, but she means it like _finding faith_ or _fate_ maybe, and she’s not wrong.) 

He flies out to Sacramento as soon as the airports open back up and hitchhikes his way West. People are fleeing East and Newt runs towards the wreckage and never looks back. 

\- 

Hedda met Beatrice because of the Kaiju. After K-Day and then Manila and then Cabo, Hedda was consumed by the problem of finding where the Kaiju were coming out from. 

“You should talk to Beatrice Makeba,” Dieter, a former Berlin Tech classmate, almost a friend, told her as he looked over Hedda’s frantic notes. “She’s an oceanographer, in Durban. My brother-in-law works with her. He says she’s looking for the origin point, too. She’ll have the geographic information you’re looking for. She thinks it has to be in some deep water trench.” 

“South Africa, Durban, oceanographer, Makeba,” Hedda repeated, already turning to Google. 

By the end of the month, Hedda was speaking to Beatrice near daily, huge maps of the Pacific posted to her walls. 

She had to write herself notes to remember when her lectures were and at night she dreamt about waves and submarines. 

(Her life is better measured in partnerships, relationships that pushed her further, further, made her better, than in romantic entanglements or papers published. There is Priya, there is Beatrice and then there is Newt, whose extremities drive her own to new heights. With Priya, there was a shared passion, with Beatrice, an all-important mission, and with Newt? The fate of humanity, the desperate, clawing love of the planet that had sustained them, had forced them to fight for everything they had.) 

\- 

Ghost Drifting, as both a concept and a reality, has always freaked Newt out a little. Because one, people in each other’s brains, and two, people _still_ in each other’s brains and still in the Jaegers in a way that all the testing available can’t quite figure out. 

_(“Chief, Chief, it’s Diablo. It’s moving! On its own!”_

_“Wake the pilots!”)_

Hedda’s reading reports about the post-Drift hangover furiously, trying to track how different theirs is. (She’d always resented Caitlin Lightcap a little for not trying harder to explain it scientifically. But Newt had already known that, hadn’t needed to see inside her brain for that.) 

Observational science is well and good but they’ve never really _known_ like this before, and that’s possibly the most frustrating thing, because neither of them has ever liked when people talked down to them, told them that there were things they would just never understand fully until they did it _(fall in love, have a child, find a home)_. 

They’ve been fighting a war for the last decade and now suddenly, they have time. And each other. 

Newt’s still getting nosebleeds. Hedda carries around a handkerchief, always reaching out towards him before he’s even noticed the blood. 

\- 

Hedda felt afraid and useless in London, even with the papers she was putting out about where the origin point was likely to be located. It was good for her career and meant to be helpful to the world, but no one was doing anything of worth with the flood of information, the mass of world’s brightest minds and their newest fixation, saving the world. 

So she followed the news about the Seoul Conference carefully, in the papers and on the internet, kept the radio on BBC World News in the background wherever she was camped out. She listened to Jasper Schoenfeld and his plea and thought, _he’s insane_ and then _I could do that; I could build that_. 

She had always assumed she would go on to build spaceships but if the world needed giant mechs, she could do that. 

\- 

Newt interviews with the PPDC in May, 2016. He’s already got more research on the kaiju out than pretty much any other biologist, because people are perplexed and afraid and Newt sees that, he gets that, but he doesn’t understand why they don’t want to know more. 

The kaiju have fundamentally changed, expanded, thrown into question what’s known. 

There’s alien life and that’s amazing and terrifying and that’s why he joins the PPDC. 

\- 

Hedda got herself hired, back before the PPDC was even called that. Five weeks after the Seoul Conference, she finally managed to schedule a meeting with Jasper Shoenfeld and flew out to America to meet him. He was polite but distant, ready to brush her off. 

Hedda changed his mind. 

“You’ll need an AI, a cutting edge operating system. And rocket launchers, not mention rockets themselves. People to study how they’re getting here, create models. And I can do all that,” Hedda insisted. 

Schoenfeld raised his eyebrows slightly and pushed his chair back from his desk. 

“You are correct,” Hedda continued, her heart thumping loudly in her chest. “I have never been on a military contract before, but you said it yourself, what you’re calling for isn’t a military operation. You want giant robots, sorry, giant _mechs_ , and I can do that.” 

Shoenfeld waved a bloody condescending ‘go on’ hand at her. 

“I am an aeronautical engineer and an astrophysicist and I am neither exaggerating nor being self-congratulatory when I tell you that you need me. That I am, in my fields, one of the best minds of my generation,” Hedda continued. “I’m not asking you to take me on because I’m Lars Gottlieb’s daughter and I need a new pet project. I am asking because my partner and I are close to finding where the Kaiju are coming out from and in six months, when you get this project off the ground? You’re going to come calling anyway. And I am here now, offering to help.” 

Shoenfeld studied her. “It’s probably going to be dangerous,” he said. 

“More dangerous than waiting around for more giant monsters to emerge from the ocean?” Hedda retorted. 

“Look, you’re right, I’m sure at some point having you on the project would be beneficial,” Shoenfeld admitted. “But I need more established names and you’re too young, Dr. Gottlieb.” 

“Again, Dr. Schoenfeld, you are building giant robots. You _want_ young. You need young. And I want to save the world. So you’re going to hire me,” Hedda finished. It was hard to breathe. 

“Alright,” Schoenfeld said, with a small, impressed smile. He got up, came around the desk and stuck his hand out. “Well, then, welcome to the team, Dr. Gottlieb.” 

\- 

They spend a couple months traveling around, explaining what exactly it is they did, how they all saved the world, because the public needs to know, history has to be set down, questions need to be asked, morale boosted. 

Hedda and Newt could go anywhere, be anything, now. Universities want them, think tanks want them, companies want them (they see opportunity where only so recently there was abject fear). There are infinite possibilities, even with the lingering terror, the nightmares. 

They can’t read each other’s minds, but Hedda looks up at him, from a bed in some hotel room in Mexico and says, “If you quote that asinine line from _Titanic_ right now, I will punch you in the stomach,” and Newt laughs and laughs. 

And Hedda smiles, just a hint on her lips and in her eyes, and turns back to her novel ( _To The Lighthouse_ , the only novel she carried with her from Shatterdome to Shatterdome, though not the same copy; she kept losing them in the shuffle). 

“I bet you they give us the Nobel,” Newt says instead. 

\- 

At first, Hedda’s father supported the Jaeger Project. 

Then he saw the two pilot Pons system. 

“This is the plan? This is the system to which we are entrusting the fate of the world? A machine that will drive men mad?” he demanded. 

“Papa, what are you talking about? That is not what it does. It works. You saw it work.” 

“You have no idea what the long term effects will be. You cannot expect to operate machinery with the mind,” Papa said. 

Their arguments only got worse because of how infrequently Hedda had time to get in contact. Vivienne pleaded with her to _understand_ , but Hedda could not. Stefan and Marcel were upset and confused when they talked to her, because they didn’t understand, but if that was the cost of saving them, Hedda could not bring herself to be sorry. Werner looked like the weight of the world was upon him, but carefully edited their father out of their conversations. Annika said fiercely, “You’re right, you’re right, Hedda.” 

Their mother said only, “Oh, my darling girl. You were born brave, you know.” 

After the Wall of Life project began, Hedda and her father stopped speaking altogether. 

“It is the best defense system,” Papa said stiffly. “And I have decided to offer my skills to it.” 

“A defense system? Papa, it’s nothing but a delusion! If people can tear down walls, then the Kaiju certainly can!” 

“Enough, Hedda! I have decided, and if you are sensible - “ 

“Sensible? Papa, you’re the one not being sensible!” 

“If that is your opinion, we have nothing left to discuss.” 

“You’re right,” Hedda snarled. “There is nothing left. I will not be calling again.” And then she hung up. 

And then she sat, stunned, until Beatrice came and gently pried the story out of her. 

“He will not see reason,” Hedda predicted, still staring at her mobile phone. 

“You should have more faith,” Beatrice chided. 

Hedda turned away. “I have faith in numbers and I have faith in God. That man has squandered the faith I put in him.” 

Then she cried, and cried, like she had not in years, not since she had rebuilt herself, muscle and skin and bone and steel. 

Beatrice held Hedda, rocked her back and forth and Hedda cried until she couldn’t. 

Some minutes or hours later, Newt stuck his head in the open lab door, stared for a second and then, hesitant, muttered, “Um. I’m just - gonna close the door, kay?” Then he awkwardly shoved himself around the slightly opened door and eased it shut, wincing when the sound echoed off the walls. 

Hedda rapidly wiped her face with the back of her hands. Crying was so undignified. “What do you need, Newton?” 

Newt sat cross-legged, on the floor, facing Hedda and Beatrice. He cleared his throat, scratched the back of his neck and began, “So, I’ve got this theory about how to reverse engineer kaiju poison, okay? And I need someone to bounce it off of. Tell me what you think.” 

\- 

After saving the world, one of the best memories (one not mixed with fearful _what if_ s) they share is Hedda’s twenty-eighth birthday. 

Improbably, they are all in Sydney. Newt and Tendo (and Alison, Tendo’s awesome dreadlocked maybe-girlfriend from Munitions). Priya and Beatrice. And Hedda, of course. The only other time they’ve all been in the same place at the same time was that first summer at the Academy. 

Tendo had scrounged up some only mildly shitty beer and Beatrice and Priya, using sources no one wants to think too long about, had managed to get into the commissary and cook some improvised chicken tikka masala. 

Hedda's face, when she sees, goes through hilarious paroxysms of _touched_ and _really confused_. “Oh,” she says, “oh. You truly needn’t have.” 

“But we did, so sit down, Doc,” Tendo says. “Not often we get get to use our downtime to actually relax.” 

(2017’s been a relatively quiet year so far, which means the PPDC has been busy with repairs and reconstruction.) 

So Hedda sits, in the open chair between Beatrice and Priya. 

After dinner, Newt scrounges around in his messenger bag and pulls out his package. “Right so, since dessert is, you know, increasingly hard to come by, I thought I would outsource that.” 

“Oh, God,” Hedda mutters. 

“Newton,” Priya says warning. 

“Relax, you guys, sheesh,” Newt says. “I just cashed in a few favors is all. No illegals acts were committed. At least not by me.” 

“We talking about drugs or dessert, here?” Alison asks. 

“It’s chocolate, okay? It’s just chocolate,” Newt says, unwrapping the bars and pushing them across the table to Hedda. “Priya kept saying she wished she could find some, so I found some.” 

“Ritter Sport?” Hedda asks, tracing over the wrapping. 

“Yeah, I mean, it’s German, we’re both kind of German,” Newt shrugs. “I figured, you know.” 

Hedda looks up and smiles. Really, full-on, teeth showing, smiles. “Thank you, Newt,” she says, and reaches across the table to pat his hand, once, twice, awkward but sincere. 

Alison drags her chair back and says, “Alright, ladies, gentleman, Tattooed Wonderboy - “ 

“Aww, thanks, Alison.” 

“-Now for my contribution to this evening’s festivities,” Alison continues, pulling out a small gift-wrapped lump from one of the many pockets in her cargo pants and handing it over to Hedda. 

Hedda unwraps it, carefully, trying not to tear the paper, because she would that person. 

“Lot of the Jaeger merch is shit,” Alison preempts, “but I saw this and thought it was nice.” 

Hedda finally finishes unwrapping the gift. It’s tiny carved wood pendent of Brawler Yukon. Hedda rubs it with her thumb. 

“Everyone should have a good luck charm and I thought, why shouldn’t yours be the first thing you built for us?” 

Hedda keeps rubbing it. “Thank you, Alison. It’s lovely.” 

(Hedda didn’t believe in luck, but she kept the pendent anyway, left it by her glasses on her desk, kept it in the pocket of her blazers or her trousers, rubbed it absently when the numbers wouldn’t flow correctly. Kept it even after the real Brawler Yukon fell. Finally, a year after they closed the Breach, she gave it to Werner’s daughter, her first and only niece. 

“I suppose I don’t need it anymore,” she told Newt.) 

\- 

In the summer of 2025, when people were finally beginning to believe the end of the world really had been averted, Hedda bought a small, one-story house on the outskirts of South Shields, at the mouth of the River Tyne, close to the North Sea. It was, she decided, a belated thirty-sixth birthday present to herself, to make up for the multiple years during the war when her birthday had slipped by barely noticed. 

She didn’t, after a decade of living a transitory life, have much to move, but Mum and Annika and Annika’s girlfriend Molly all drove up from London with her on a Friday morning in July. 

Hedda watched England roll by out the car window and listened to her mother’s observations and the _Simon and Garfunkel_ albums her mother always played on long car rides. Hedda still couldn’t listen them to without bringing up the physical sensation of movement. 

Newt showed up a week later. Hedda had told him about the house, of course, sent him photos and her plans for repairs. He hadn’t told her he was coming, but he was more predictable than he thought, sometimes (at least to her). 

He emerged from a taxi, bedraggled and holding a beat up duffle bag, in the early afternoon, about a week after Hedda moved in. When she’d talked to him the night before, he’d been particularly vague about what he was up to, as if she didn’t already know. 

“Hello, Newt,” Hedda said, pushing open her door and leaning against the frame. 

“Hi, Hedda,” Newt said, smiling a little crookedly as the taxi rolled away. “Surprised to see me?” 

“Not particularly,” Hedda replied. 

Newt makes a face and then shrugs. “Yeah, don’t know what I expected.” 

“Nor do I,” Hedda said, smiling in spite of herself. “Come in, then.” 

“Yeah, yeah. Just looking at the garden. It’s kind of nice,” Newt said, coming up the walk. 

Hedda held the door open for him and Newt dropped his bag carelessly in entranceway. 

Then he hugged her tightly and she wrapped an arm around his back, smoothing her palm over the expanse of his spine (it was harder to miss physical cues when she could feel his mind present in the back of hers). 

“Hey,” Newt mumbled. “Your hair smells good.” 

“Yes, shampoo is quite the invention,” Hedda said. 

“Shut up. I just took a four hour train ride for you. You could at least pretend to be grateful,” Newt grumbled, disengaging. 

“Oh, you poor _darling_ ,” Hedda laughed, only half-mocking. “Come, let’s put your things away and I’ll show you the house.” 

There wasn’t much to show: a living room whose chief virtue was its bay window, the red-mud colored kitchen from which a sliver of the sea could be spotted, a tightly packed dining room, all spotted with bookcases that Hedda planned to fill in. The office, to double as a guest room. 

“And the bedroom,” Hedda finished. 

“Awesome,” Newt said, throwing himself dramatically on the bed. 

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Hedda said. But she lay down next to him anyway, shifting until their upper arms and ankles touched. “So?” she asked. “What do you think? I don’t suppose we’ll spend much time in it during the academic year, what with needing to be in the States, but, well.” 

Newt grinned. “Nah, it’s great,” he said. “We’ll come in the summer and, I don’t know, eat fish and chips and never, ever go swimming because it’s always too cold.” 

Hedda huffed and tangled her fingers in his. 

\- 

They have, most likely, already lived the ten most important years of their lives. 

When people write biographies of Hedda or Newt or Hedda and Newt (and they will), it will be their shared tenure with the PPDC that garners the most interest, understandably. People will want to know the story of those dark, rainy days in Hong Kong, at the birth of the new year, when everything came together. 

They couldn’t get rid of each other if they tried, now. 

But they never _really_ try. 

\- 

_[Excerpted from “How Science Saved the World”, in the January 12, 2035 special edition of the New York Times Magazine]_

_A decade later, Geiszler and Gottlieb still disagree on many things._

_“Indeed, most things,” Gottlieb says drily._

_“Music, the proper way to drink coffee, what we thought of that Guardian article on the long term environmental impacts of Kaiju Blue,” Geiszler lists offhandedly._

_But, they conclude, on the important matters, they are of one mind. One issue on which they present a strong and united front is their shared belief that the Rift could reopen and the Kaiju could return._

_Science saved the world once and according to Geiszler and Gottlieb, it may just need to again._

_“They’ve come here before - they can come here again,” Geiszler says about the Kaiju._

_“This story is not over,” Gottlieb agrees._

**Author's Note:**

> I'm American, so if there's anything off about what I've written regarding the British or German education system, let me know! Or if there are Americanisms where there shouldn't be! 
> 
> Thank you so much for reading!


End file.
